Spotify has spent the better part of two decades convincing the world that convenience beats fidelity. Now it wants you to sit down, shut up, take your shoes off, and listen. Really listen. Inside its London headquarters, the company has opened a 30-seat Listening Lounge designed to showcase its long-delayed lossless tier, which finally arrived in 2025 after competitors like TIDAL, Qobuz, and Apple Music had already moved on to higher ground. Timing has never been Spotify’s strong suit when it comes to sound quality, but at least it showed up.

The Listening Lounge is invite-only, which feels about right. Spotify Premium users and “top fans” get the nod, assuming they want to trade playlists and background noise for something resembling focus. The room is built around album-centric sessions and curated listening events, which Spotify now calls “intentional listening.” Audiophiles have been calling it Tuesday night since 1978, but sure, let’s rebrand it and roll it out to the press who will eat it up like horseradish on gefilte fish at the Passover seder. On second thought — stick with the biltong and some mustard.

To Spotify’s credit, it didn’t cheap out on the system. This isn’t a soundbar and some mood lighting. The setup leans hard into old-school hi-fi: custom horn-loaded speakers from Friendly Pressure, Bryston 3B Cubed power amplifiers, a PrimaLuna DAC paired with an Evo 400 tube preamp, and a Bluesound Node Icon handling streaming duties.

The speakers are big, unapologetic, and built around Alnico drivers and compression horns that don’t care about your furniture layout or your neighbors. This is two-channel stereo with no Atmos tricks, no DSP safety net, and no interest in pretending otherwise. Left, right, and whatever your ears can handle.

The room itself plays along. Designed with a Japanese vinyl bar aesthetic, the system sits elevated like some kind of altar, because apparently we’re doing ritual now. Acoustic treatment is handled seriously, reflections are controlled, distractions minimized. And yes, you take your shoes off. Nothing says “we’re serious about lossless audio” quite like white socks from Marks & Spencer on a polished floor while a tube preamp warms the room.

The timing of all this is hard to ignore. Spotify’s lossless rollout wasn’t early. It wasn’t even competitive. It was late. While others were pushing 24-bit streams and building credibility with listeners who actually care about sound, Spotify leaned into scale, algorithms, and playlists designed for people who don’t want to think too hard about what they’re hearing. Now that fidelity has become “important,” Spotify is doing what large companies do best. Build an experience, control the narrative, invite the right people, and hope nobody remembers how they had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the room.

The system, however, does its job. Reports point to serious dynamics, scale that fills the room, and a level of clarity that makes lossless audio feel like more than a marketing checkbox. Horn speakers bring speed and impact, along with a presentation that can get a little sharp if the recording demands it. That’s the trade-off. This setup doesn’t smooth things over or make bad recordings sound polite. It tells the truth, whether you like it or not. There’s a lesson there for the high-end audio community.

This whole exercise isn’t really about a room in London. It’s about positioning. Spotify wants to be seen as a company that understands high-end audio, not just one that delivers background music between podcasts and ads. It wants a seat at the same table as services that built their reputations on fidelity, not convenience. That’s a tough pivot when your entire business model was built on making music easier, faster, smaller, and rather crappy sounding.

The Bottom Line

The Listening Lounge is impressive. The system is real. The intent is finally pointed in the right direction. But there’s an unavoidable edge of irony here. Audiophiles have been building rooms like this for decades without the need for an invite list or a press release. Spotify didn’t invent serious listening. It just discovered that it matters.

And that’s where this either becomes something meaningful or just another well-lit detour. Spotify isn’t a niche player trying to earn credibility. It’s the largest music streaming platform on the planet, with hundreds of millions of users; more than all of its direct competitors combined. If lossless audio actually matters to the company, this can’t stop at a single curated room in London with a guest list and a carefully controlled narrative. That’s not a movement. That’s a demo.

Because the real test isn’t what happens inside that room. It’s what happens outside of it. Does Spotify push lossless as a core feature across the platform, front and center, where its massive user base can actually engage with it? Does it educate listeners on why better sound quality matters? Does it integrate that experience into everyday listening in a way that doesn’t require an invitation and a plane ticket?

Right now, it feels like Spotify is trying to prove something—to the press, to the industry, maybe even to itself. But if this is going to land, it needs to scale beyond a showcase and become part of the product story in a real, unavoidable way. Otherwise, this Listening Lounge risks being remembered for what it looks like today: a very expensive reminder that Spotify showed up late and is still figuring out how serious it wants to be.

Related Reading:

from the McPromptism dept

I’m going to trust that most of our audience will have some idea of what McCarthyism was in the 1950s. To summarize very briefly, it was an anti-communist campaign that spread into becoming equally anti-leftist throughout the country, with a specific focus on driving the supposed communist influences out of major media in America, such as radio and Hollywood. This led to a public hyper-vigilant in looking for supposed communists everywhere, as well as plenty of cases of false accusations of communist activity purposefully foisted upon people for personal reasons. This rabid, frothy-mouthed era of suspicion became a major stain on America in the 1950s.

I’m watching a version of this begin to take form around artificial intelligence. I know, I know: there are very real dangers and negative outcomes that could come to be from AI. That was true of communism and our Cold War enemy in the Soviet Union as well. My point is not that AI is great all the time and any pushback against it is invalid. Instead, my point is that we’re starting to see what I’ll call McPromptism, where some percentage of the public looks for AI everywhere it can and, if use is suspected, immediately decries it as terrible and demands that people not engage with the supposed user.

And just like McCarthyism, McPromptism gets its accusations wrong sometimes. You can see a version of that in the story of Aspyr’s remastering of old Tomb Raider games and the horrible outfits that were produced for the protagonist, Lara Croft.

Earlier this week we reported on fan reaction to the latest update to the Tomb Raider I-III Remastered collection, in which the game received a new Challenge Mode, while Lara received a suite of new outfits to wear as rewards. And oh wow, they were bad. Comically bad. So bad, in fact, that one of the remaster’s original artists posted on X to distance himself and his colleagues from the dross. Alongside all of this was the suspicion that genAI might have been involved in the fits’ creation, given just how dreadful they looked. Publisher Aspyr has now finally responded to the claims to insist no AI was used at all, instead stating they were created by “our team of artists.” Which raises more questions.

If you want to see a somewhat humorous look at the outfit textures that are the subject of public complaint, here you go.

On the one hand, for someone like me who is not into the anti-AI dogma out there, it is objectively funny for some people to point at bad video game textures and claim they’re so bad because they’re obviously created using generative AI… only to have the company that made them say, “Nuh uh! It was our human employees who made them!” It’s almost Monty-Python-esque, in a way.

But this default among some in the gaming public to be “This thing in gaming is bad, so it must have been made using AI!” is just one more kind of silly that is out there right now. Aspyr doesn’t exactly have a perfect reputation when it comes to remastering games, after all, and it built that reputation long before genAI came along.

It seems clear that this was a case of images being released to promote the remastered game that Aspyr didn’t live up to in the actual game itself. No AI, just human beings not hitting the mark. It happens all the time. Hell, there is even a chance that AI could have done a better job. Not a certainty by any stretch, but a possibility.

But the real take away from this otherwise minor episode for me was the McPromptism misfire. If you’re going to rage against the literal machine in the video gaming industry, which I think is the wrong stance to take anyway, at least let it be righteous rage.

Filed Under: ai, mcpromptism, tomb raider, video games

Companies: aspyr

Ken Pillonel, a Swiss engineer, struck again. He’s well-known for refurbishing outdated iPhones with creative add-on cases, which he even sells. This time, however, he turned the tables. On April 1st, he completed a totally new prototype in just a few days, a slim protective cover that hands the iPhone 17 Pro a working Lightning port right where Apple moved on from it.

If you’ve recently updated from an iPhone 14 or earlier, you understand the pain. All of those old cords, docks, and chargers you used to love are now rendered worthless unless you carry a separate adapter with you everywhere. Pillonel effectively solved the challenge by working in reverse. Instead of forcing the phone to use a newer plug, he designed a cover that allows Lightning cables to plug right in while the iPhone 17 Pro remains safely tucked inside its USB-C shell.

Sale

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• 3 in 1 Wireless Charger Station: This 3-in-1 wireless charger is designed to work seamlessly with a variety of devices, including iPhone 17 16e…
• Fast Charging Power: Ensure your devices are efficiently charged with up to 7.5W for phones, 5W for earbuds, and 3W for watches. The charger is…
• Portable and Foldable Design: Featuring a foldable, lightweight design, this charging station is ideal for home, office, travel or trip. Manufacturer…

It all starts with some careful effort on the electronics side. He designed tiny custom circuit boards to shrink a standard USB-C to Lightning adapter down to almost nothing. These boards are located inside the bottom border of the casing and add only a few mils of thickness. Next came the casing, which was produced in flexible TPU using a high-end 3D printer that is good at reducing waste. He also made a little jig to help get the MagSafe magnets in the appropriate place, and when he snapped everything together, it fit like a charm, no tools required.

When it’s all put together, the case feels exactly like any other you’d get in a store, soft to the touch and durable enough for daily use. When you insert the iPhone 17 Pro inside, the internal cables align neatly with the phone’s USB-C port. Plugging a Lightning cable into the new hole outside just works; power flows exactly like it would on an older model. Yes, charging works well, as he demonstrated in his whole build video; now he just needs to test data transfer and other accessories.

Pillonel never meant to sell this one. He refers to the finished piece as one of the oddest things he has ever put together, a tongue-in-cheek reference to Lightning’s official departure from the roster years ago. Nonetheless, the project illustrates a wider point. With some work and the correct parts, compatibility gaps between old and new technology can be bridged in inventive ways that keep favorite accessories alive.
[Source]

Some projects need no complicated use case to justify their development, and so it was with [Janne]’s BeamInk, which mashes a Wacom pen tablet with an xTool F1 laser engraver with the help of a little digital glue. For what purpose? So one can use a digital pen to draw with a laser in real time, of course!

Here’s how it works: a Python script grabs events from a USB drawing tablet via evdev (the Linux kernel’s event device, which allows user programs to read raw device events), scales the tablet size to the laser’s working area, and turns pen events into a stream of laser power and movement G-code. The result? Draw on tablet, receive laser engraving.

It’s a playful project, but it also exists as a highly modular concept that can be adapted to different uses. If you’re looking at this and sensing a visit from the Good Ideas Fairy, check out the GitHub repository for more technical details plus tips for adapting it to other hardware.

We’re reminded of past projects like a laser cutter with Etch-a-Sketch controls as well as an attempt to turn pen marks into laser cuts, but something about using a drawing tablet for real-time laser control makes this stand on its own.

With Apple turning 50 years old today, Northumbria University’s Nick Dalton goes through some of the tech giant’s most notable tech milestones.

A version of this article was originally published by The Conversation (CC BY-ND 4.0)

In the early 1970s, the idea of an ordinary person owning a computer sounded absurd. Computers back then were more like aircraft carriers or nuclear power plants than household appliances – vast machines housed in data centres operated by teams of specialists, serving governments, universities and large corporations.

Then came Apple.

Founded on April 1 1976 by ‘college dropouts’ Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the Silicon Valley start-up did not invent computing. What it did was arguably more important: it helped turn computing into a personal technology.

Before Apple, computers were largely sold in kit form. Jobs saw that people wanted them pre-assembled and ready to run. The earliest Apple I units, featuring handmade koa wooden cases, now sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

As an early Apple adopter and app developer, here’s my selection of the company’s (and Jobs’s) most significant technological achievements over the last 50 years.

Apple II – beige yet distinctive

Early personal computers were more curiosities than practical tools. The Apple II, launched in June 1977, introduced something new: style. Even its colour – beige – was distinctive, contrasting with the black metal boxes common at that time.

Bottom of Form

The use of colour graphics was both new and exciting, and the keyboard felt satisfying to use. A simple speaker, with only a single-bit output, was ingeniously coaxed into producing tones and even speech-like sounds. The design revolution stretched as far as the packaging: Jerry Manock, Apple’s first in-house designer, placed the machine in a moulded plastic case which looked sleek and professional.

The mouse – a whole new way of interacting

By 1979, the 24-year-old Jobs – sensing that tech giant IBM was catching up with Apple – went looking for the next big thing. The photocopier company Xerox, wanting pre-IPO shares in Apple, offered a visit to its nearby research labs as an inducement. Jobs realised that researchers such as Alan Kay at Xerox’s Palo Alto research centre were creating the next generation of computing interfaces.

Central to this was a device invented by Kay’s mentor, Douglas Engelbart, at Stanford University in the mid-1960s and nicknamed ‘the mouse’. Engelbart’s vision of computers as machines to augment the human mind inspired Kay and colleagues to create graphical displays in which users interacted with scrollbars, buttons, menus and windows.

Macintosh – dawn of the modern product launch

Jobs thought anyone should be able to use a computer. In January 1984, the first Apple Mac pushed this idea to new extremes. The traditional need for obscure computer commands (and manuals) vanished. Early adopters such as myself felt we just knew how to do everything.

But the Mac’s launch was not just another technological leap for Apple. It also inspired the now-familiar cultural moment of the modern product launch. Following a teasing Super Bowl advert directed by Ridley Scott, Jobs used a 1,500-seat theatre on January 24 to create a stage performance centred on a single charismatic presenter. Jobs let a small, square and still-beige computer (then known as Macintosh) out of its bag – and it began speaking for itself, to rapturous applause.

Pixar – Jobs’s side hustle

In its first decade, Apple grew at an exceptional rate – but it also came close to financial collapse on several occasions. This led to one of the most dramatic moments in Apple’s history when, in May 1985, the company forced Jobs out.

A year later and now in charge of the start-up NeXT Inc, Jobs bought a division of George Lucas’s film company which was soon rebranded as Pixar. Its RenderMan software generated images by distributing processing across multiple machines simultaneously.

Pixar, jokingly referred to as Jobs’s “side hustle”, would become one of the world’s most influential (and valuable) animation production companies, having released the first fully computer-animated feature film in Toy Story (1995).

iMac – a meeting of minds

After a failed attempt to develop a new operating system with IBM, Apple eventually bought Jobs’s company NeXT. In September 1997, he returned to Apple as interim CEO with the company “two months from bankruptcy”. The move, though welcomed by many Apple users, terrified some of its employees. Jobs quickly began firing staff and shutting down failed products.

During this restructuring, he visited Apple’s design studio and immediately hit it off with young British designer Jony Ive. Their meeting of minds led to the 1998 candy-coloured translucent iMac. Essentially smaller, cheaper NeXT machines, iMac (the ‘i’ stood for internet) also kicked off another Apple habit: abandoning ageing technology. The floppy disk drive was ditched in favour of a CD drive – a move heavily criticised at the time, but later widely copied.

iPod – 1,000 songs in your pocket

For Apple, computing was always about more than, well, computing. In 2001, the company began focusing on processing sound and video, not just text and pictures. By November that year, it had released the iPod – a personal music player capable of storing “1,000 songs in your pocket”, compared with a maximum of 20-30 on each cassette tape in a Sony Walkman.

The iPod used an elegant ‘click wheel’ to operate the screen. Music was synced through a new application called iTunes. By 2005, people were using iTunes to manage audio downloaded automatically from the internet using a process called RSS. This in turn put the pod in podcasting.

iPhone – a computer in everyone’s hands

By 2007, many mobile phone companies had approached Apple about merging the iPod with their phones. Instead, on January 9, Jobs unveiled Apple’s most ambitious product yet: a combined phone, music player and Mac computer – all at the size of a handset with no physical keyboard and huge screen.

Most media ‘experts’, from TechCrunch to the Guardian, predicted the iPhone would bomb. Steve Ballmer, then CEO of Microsoft, mocked the US$500 price tag, saying nobody would buy it. In fact, 1.4m iPhones were sold by the end of the year – and over 3bn more since then. This truly put a computer into everyone’s hands – and opened the door to social media as we know it today.

App Store’s software revolution

By mid-2008, the iPhone enabled third-party developers the chance to create a dizzying range of new applications. At the same time, the App Store – launched on July 10 2008 – addressed one of the most complex problems: how to distribute and commercialise these ‘apps’. Historically, they were often copied and distributed freely. The App Store changed this, using strong encryption to ensure the copy sold could only be used by that specific user, thus eliminating software piracy.

By establishing the first (eponymous) App Store, Apple changed the way people discover and purchase software. This led to an explosion of apps and a simple but powerful idea: whatever you wanted to do, someone, somewhere, had already built it. Apple captured this shift in a slogan that became part of everyday language: “There’s an app for that”.

Time and again, this extraordinary company has anticipated the value of opening up computing to everyone. Happy birthday, Apple.

By Dr Nick Dalton

Nick Dalton is an associate professor in the School of Computer Science at Northumbria University in Newcastle. His background is as a computer scientist crossing between architecture and computation. His principal area of expertise is in the design, development and evaluation of human computer interfaces with a specialism in the design of ubiquitous computing technology.

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There’s a great debate these days about what the current crop of AI chatbots should and shouldn’t do for you. We aren’t wise enough to know the answer, but we were interested in hearing what is, apparently, Microsoft’s take on it. Looking at their terms of service for Copilot, we read in the original bold:

Copilot is for entertainment purposes only. It can make mistakes, and it may not work as intended. Don’t rely on Copilot for important advice. Use Copilot at your own risk.

While that’s good advice, we are pretty sure we’ve seen people use LLMs, including Copilot, for decidedly non-entertaining tasks. But, at least for now, if you are using Copilot for non-entertainment purposes, you are violating the terms of service.

Legal

While we know how it is when lawyers get involved in anything, we can’t help but think this is simply a hedge so that when Copilot gives you the wrong directions or a recipe for cake that uses bleach, they can say, “We told you not to use this for anything.”

It reminds us of the Prohibition-era product called a grape block. It featured a stern warning on the label that said: “Warning. Do not place product in one quart of water in a cool, dark place for more than two weeks, or else an illegal alcoholic beverage will result.” That doesn’t fool anyone.

We get it. They are just covering their… bases. When you do something stupid based on output from Copilot, they can say, “Oh, yeah, that was just for entertainment.” But they know what you are doing, and they even encourage it. Heck, they’re doing it themselves. Would it stand up in court? We don’t know.

Others

Now it is true that probably everyone will give you a similar warning. OpenAI, for example, has this to say:

• Output may not always be accurate. You should not rely on Output from our Services as a sole source of truth or factual information, or as a substitute for professional advice.
• You must evaluate Output for accuracy and appropriateness for your use case, including using human review as appropriate, before using or sharing Output from the Services.
• You must not use any Output relating to a person for any purpose that could have a legal or material impact on that person, such as making credit, educational, employment, housing, insurance, legal, medical, or other important decisions about them.
• Our Services may provide incomplete, incorrect, or offensive Output that does not represent OpenAI’s views. If Output references any third party products or services, it doesn’t mean the third party endorses or is affiliated with OpenAI.

Notice that it doesn’t pretend you are only using it for a chuckle. Anthropic has even more wording, but still stops short of pretending to be a party game. Copilot, on the other hand, is for fun.

Your Turn

How about you? Do you use any of the LLMs for anything other than “entertainment?” If you do, how do you validate the responses you get?

When things do go wrong, who should be liable? There have been court cases where LLM companies have been sued for everything, ranging from users committing suicide to defaming people. Are the companies behind these tools responsible? Should they be?

Let us know what you think in the comments.

from the merge-ALL-the-things! dept

Right wing broadcasters are having a very good time under Brendan Carr, who has looked to destroy all remaining media consolidation limits to let them merge. Such companies, like Sinclair, Nexstar, and Tegna, don’t do journalism so much as they do soggy, right wing propaganda and infotainment, usually with endless fear mongering about drugs, homelessness, and crime rates.

They’re just one part of the right wing’s effort to remake the entirety of media into a massive safe space for dim autocrats.

Carr’s latest effort: he rubber stamped Nexstar Media Group’s $6.2 billion purchase of Tegna behind closed doors. Carr let the merged companies ignore our remaining media consolidation limits, which prevent one company from being the primary broadcast news voice for more than 39 percent of households (the new combined company reaches 54.5 percent).

Nexstar (a very Republican friendly company that also owns The Hill), not that long ago fired a journalist whose reporting angered Trump. Combined with Tegna, the two companies will own 221 Big Four broadcast stations, or more than half of the U.S. stations affiliated with FOX, NBC, ABC, or CBS.

Carr’s been on a campaign to ensure these right-wing loyal companies have more power in their dealings with their national counterparts (remember how they helped Carr censor Jimmy Kimmel?). The efforts come as local Americans increasingly live in “local news deserts” where quality local journalism simply no longer exists.

Anna Gomez, the lone Democrat left at the FCC (Republicans refuse to fill the other seat), didn’t have nice things to say about Carr’s decision to ignore the public interest protections without a transparent, public vote (indicating Carr very clearly knew this would be very unpopular):

As always, Carr’s order approving the merger leverages all manner of pseudo-legalistic sounding bullshit to justify ignoring Congress and the law. And he parrots a bunch of completely empty promises by Nexstar that they’ll ramp up the production of more “local news”:

“We note that Nexstar has made significant commitments in the agency’s record as well,
further ensuring that this transaction promotes the public interest. To further serve its local communities, Nexstar commits to expanding its investment in local news and programming, including increasing the amount of local news it provides in acquired markets.”

Except again, by “news” we mean right wing propaganda. And Brendan Carr never meaningfully holds corporate power accountable for anything, unless it involves a comedian making fun of the president or companies not being suitably racist enough for the president’s liking.

Eight states have already filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of the decision. The lawsuits understandably focus heavily on the competition impacts, and the likely higher cable TV prices that will result for most of you:

“By consolidating with a major competitor, Nexstar would likely acquire the power to charge MVPDs higher retransmission consent fees for Big 4 station content. In turn, those MVPDs would likely pass on the increased retransmission consent fees, in large measure, to their subscribers in the form of substantially higher cable and satellite bills.”

California regulators attempted to slow the process down by proposing a standard timing agreement with Nexstar, where the company would suspend its acquisition of Tegna until the state completed its investigation. 

But something of particular note: on pages 16-17 of the states’ amended complaint, it becomes clear that Nexstar completely ignored the State AGs for 8 days, then ignored their lawsuit for another 18 hours, and then told the state AGs “The relief sought in your Complaint is no longer available.”

In other words, what passes for some of the only real antitrust enforcement we have (a scattered coalition of states) have to fight both consolidated corporate power and the authoritarian, corrupt government simultaneously to make any inroads in the public interest.

“This is completely unprecedented,” Free Press (the consumer group, not the Bari Weiss troll farm) Research Director S. Derek Turner told me via email. “Nexstar and the Trump DOJ and FCC seem to have acted in concert to deprive the citizens of of these 8 states their rights to have our AG enforce the antitrust laws on our behalf.”

If Carr succeeds here, I suspect it won’t be long before you see Sinclair and this new combined company merge. Carr is also fielding requests by the big four national broadcasters to eliminate restrictions preventing them from merging as well (one of many reasons they’ve been so feckless). After that, you’ll likely see more consolidation across telecom, tech, and media.

It is, just in case we’ve forgotten, the complete opposite of the “antitrust reform populism” Trump, and a long line of useful idiots, promised last election season.

While this is certainly an act of some desperation (less than 20% of all U.S. TV viewing is now broadcast), claiming this doesn’t matter because this is “just local broadcasting” and the “future is the internet” (something I see often) is a violent misread of the dire stakes of the situation. This aggressive, Trump-loyal consolidation hasn’t, and isn’t, just being confined to broadcast television (see: Twitter, TikTok).

This is, to be clear, a coordinated and illegal authoritarian/corporatist effort to ignore the public interest and the law to expand right wing propaganda’s power over an already clearly befuddled and broadly misinformed electorate. Right wingers will continue to engage in this quest to dominate the entirety of U.S. media (following in the steps of Victor Orban in Hungary) until they run into something other than the political and policy equivalent of soft pudding.

Filed Under: agitprop, autocracy, brendan carr, fcc, journalism, local news, media consolidation, propaganda, tv

Companies: nexstar, tegna

Isaiah Taylor was sixteen when he decided the nuclear industry had a size problem. Not that reactors were too dangerous or too expensive, though they are both, but that they were simply too big. The multi-gigawatt monuments to Cold War-era engineering that still dot the American landscape were designed for a grid that moved power in one direction: from a distant plant to a distant city. They were never meant to sit behind a hyperscaler’s fence line, feeding a cluster of GPU racks whose appetite doubles every eighteen months.

Taylor, now 27, founded Valar Atomics in 2023 to build something different. On Tuesday, the El Segundo, California-based startup announced it has raised $450 million at a $2 billion valuation, according to Bloomberg. The round comprises $340 million in equity and $110 million in debt, and it lands barely five months after a $130 million Series A that valued the company at a fraction of its current price.

The backers read like a roster of the American defence-tech establishment that has lately been writing enormous cheques. Palmer Luckey, the Anduril Industries founder whose company was recently reported to be pursuing a $4 billion raise at a $60 billion valuation, is an investor. So is Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir Technologies. The earlier Series A was led by Snowpoint Ventures, the firm co-founded by Doug Philippone, Palantir’s former head of global defence, alongside Day One Ventures and Dream Ventures. Lockheed Martin board member and former AT&T chief executive John Donovan also participated.

Valar’s pitch is built around what it calls “gigasites”, sprawling industrial campuses that would host hundreds or even thousands of small, high-temperature gas-cooled reactors operating in concert. Each unit uses helium as a coolant and TRISO fuel encased in graphite, a combination that allows the reactors to run at significantly higher temperatures than conventional light-water designs. The company says these clusters can deliver dense, steady, carbon-free power tailored to the load profiles of AI data centres, industrial manufacturers, and grid-constrained regions.

It is an audacious answer to an increasingly urgent question: where will the electricity come from? The International Energy Agency projects that data-centre power consumption will double by 2026. Goldman Sachs estimates that 85 to 90 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity will eventually be needed to help fill the gap. Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have all signed nuclear power agreements in recent months, but the reactors those deals depend on do not yet exist at commercial scale.

Valar claims a meaningful head start. In November 2025, the company announced that its NOVA Core achieved zero-power criticality at Los Alamos National Laboratory’s National Criticality Experiments Research Centre, making it what the Breakthrough Institute described as the first company to reach that milestone under the US Department of Energy’s Nuclear Reactor Pilot Programme. Zero-power criticality — a self-sustaining chain reaction of uranium-235 without reaching full operating temperatures — is a necessary validation step, not a working power plant, but it is further than most of Valar’s competitors have publicly demonstrated.

The company is now preparing its Ward250 reactor, a 100-kilowatt thermal high-temperature gas-cooled unit, for power operations at the Utah San Rafael Energy Research Centre. In February 2026, the reactor was airlifted from California to Utah aboard three C-17 Globemaster military cargo aircraft in a joint operation between the Departments of Defence and Energy — a logistical stunt that doubled as a proof of concept for rapid reactor deployment. Valar is targeting operational status before 4 July 2026, the deadline the DOE set for three reactors in its pilot programme to achieve criticality.

Taylor’s trajectory has been unconventional even by deep-tech standards. A self-taught coder who launched his first venture as a teenager, he comes from a family with nuclear roots: his great-grandfather, Ward Schaap, was a physicist on the Manhattan Project. The Ward250 reactor carries Schaap’s name. Taylor has assembled a leadership team that includes Mark Mitchell, the former president of Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation, and Muhammad Shahzad, the former president and chief financial officer of Relativity Space.

The competitive field is crowded and well-funded. TerraPower, backed by Bill Gates, broke ground on a sodium-cooled reactor in Wyoming last year. Kairos Power is building a molten-salt demonstration plant in Tennessee. X-energy has a partnership with Dow Chemical for an industrial HTGR. Oklo, which went public via a SPAC in 2024, is developing a fast-neutron microreactor. None has yet delivered commercial power from an advanced design.

Valar has also taken a combative approach to regulation that few young companies would risk. In April 2025, the startup sued the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, arguing that the agency’s licensing framework unlawfully restricts small-scale reactor innovation by requiring the same approval process for low-power test reactors as for full-scale commercial plants. The lawsuit, filed alongside the states of Texas, Utah, Louisiana, Florida, and Arizona, as well as fellow reactor startups Last Energy and Deep Fission, seeks to shift regulatory authority for small reactors to individual states. The case has since been paused amid the Trump administration’s broader executive order to overhaul the NRC.

The $2 billion valuation places Valar among the most richly valued nuclear startups in the United States, a distinction that would have seemed absurd five years ago. Whether the premium reflects genuine confidence in the technology or the gravitational pull of AI-adjacent capital is a question the next eighteen months should begin to answer. If the Ward250 reaches power operations in Utah this summer, Valar will have done something no advanced-reactor startup has managed: moved from incorporation to criticality to grid-connected electricity in roughly three years. If it does not, $2 billion will buy a very expensive physics experiment in the desert.